Creations, Inspirations and Life

In The Beginning…

Only kidding, but damn I do love that Family Guy episode, I think it will have to make an appearance in the art journal very early on!

Seriously though this post is an introduction to my art journal, don’t expect much, I just thought that it would be interesting to show pictures of how the book began as well as how it develops and what it becomes as I work on it.

As you can see it’s a plain, boring black sketchbook, spiral bound and with an elasticated strap around the right edge. There are several reasons for this, the first and most important being that it was cheap, a decent size and did I mention…cheap! In the future I may make some of my own hand made journals to fill but for now this was what I had available to me.

Normally I tend to steer clear of ring binder sketchbooks because I generally prefer a hardback book, I did, however, feel it would be interesting to add things to the rings and really work with them to incorporate them into the journal in their own right. I also felt the rings would make it easier to attach other pages into the book as I dislike gluing such things in over existing pages. It’s another reason why hand made journals can be so good to use, particularly if they are not bound until all of the pages are complete.

I’m uncertain whether I will leave the elastic strap on or remove or alter it in some way, it will depend on what happens to the cover as I already have some ideas for using polyfiller to create some interesting texture there…but perhaps I have said too much!

I gesso’d a double page this evening in the journal ready for another day and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the paper despite it being a cheap book. For those interested the paper is, according to the packaging, 150gsm and watercolour paper (though it does not feel like traditional watercolour paper to touch). I guess I’ll see soon enough how well it stands up to being messed with in various ways. Let the fun begin!